Nadri felt a hand grip his shoulder and then heard the gravel voice of Werigg Gunnson in his ear.
‘Let him through, lad,’ he said. ‘Helbeard challenges the elgi.’
‘How, in this?’ asked Nadri, fending off another thrust that nearly took off his ear.
As the challenge was met, the pressure on the dwarfs leavened. Vrekki shouldered up the line and was standing alongside Nadri, the elf champion facing him.
The fighting hadn’t ceased, it merely allowed for the passage of the two warriors so they might meet in combat. No order was given to let through, it was merely understood. Vrekki threw the first blow, taking a chunk from the elf’s shield, and the crushing pressure of the grind returned in earnest.
Through the frenzy, Nadri caught slashes of their duel, although to refer to it thus would not be accurate. Vrekki fought two-handed, using the thick haft of his mattock to parry. Like the elf, he had runes too, and they flashed along the shaft of his weapon and the talisman he wore around his neck.
To Nadri it seemed like many minutes but it was over in seconds.
Vrekki battered the white-haired champion hard, hurling blow upon blow against his shield. It looked like he was winning, until having soaked up all the punishment he was willing to, the elf thrust from beneath the guard of his shield and pierced poor Vrekki’s heart. The champion died instantly, his mouth formed into an inchoate curse.
With their thane’s death, Nadri felt the Copperfists falter. A ripple, almost impossible to discern, fed down their ranks. The elves felt it too and pushed. Two spears came Nadri’s way at once. He parried one, but the other pierced his chest, just below the shoulder, and he cried out. The white-haired champion had discarded his shield and fought only with his sword. Pinioned and in agony, Nadri was an easy kill. But before the deathblow came, he flung his axe. It turned one and a half times in the air then embedded itself in the elf’s face, splitting his nose in two and carving into his skull like an egg.
He fell, brutally, and the momentum shifted again.
There was a cheer of ‘Khazuk!’ of which Nadri was only vaguely aware, before the push came again. It pressed him into the spear that was pinning him and he roared in pain and anger. Unarmed, there was little he could do but hold up his shield and pray to Valaya it would be enough. At either side, though he couldn’t move to look properly, he felt his fellow clanners hacking with their blades.
‘Take it, lad!’ Werigg bellowed from behind, a hammer slipped into Nadri’s grasp which he used to smash the spear haft jutting from his chest. The immense pressure of the other dwarf’s considerable bulk levelled against his back followed swiftly after as Werigg got his head down and pushed.
The elves were reeling, on their heels and close to capitulation. Like a ship, the dwarfs its starboard, the elves port, the line pitched and yawed as both sides fought for supremacy. More tenacious than they had any right to be, the elves held on.
‘Khazuk!’ the Copperfists yelled, but still could find no breach in their enemy’s resolve.
A foot… two… then three, the dwarfs gained ground by bloody increments but the elves would not yield.
Amazed he was still alive, Nadri forgot the pain from his chest and bludgeoned spearmen with his borrowed hammer.
‘Uzkul!’ he cried as a splash of crimson lined his face like a baptism, echoing Vrekki, honouring the thane’s sacrifice. It was madness, a terrible churn of bodies and blades without end. He wondered briefly if the halls of Grimnir were steeped in such carnage.
A horn rang out, so deep and sonorous as to only be dwarfen, dragging Nadri from his dark reverie.
The elf line trembled, just the lightest tremor at first but then building to a destructive quake. Like a tree hewn at the root and felled by its own weight, the spearmen buckled. It was as if they bent at the middle and were funnelling into the hole where Snorri had forced his wedge of gromril.
Hearthguard were tough, implacable warriors and Snorri had rammed a cohort of a hundred right down the throat of the elven infantry. To see them broken so utterly by the prince’s charge stirred Morgrim’s blood, but it was also reckless.
‘You did this,’ he said, a grimace revealing his displeasure.
‘I did nothing but agree with you, old friend,’ said Drogor with a plaintive tone, though his eyes flashed eagerly to see such carnage wrought upon the elves.
‘He has overstretched and left himself vulnerable.’
Drogor appeared nonplussed, gesturing to the elf ranks.
‘The elgi are in flight, I can see no danger. Your cousin has done what Brynnoth could not, and broken their ranks.’
‘Aye,’ snapped Morgrim, ‘and he will not stop until he’s reached the walls and torn apart the gate. That, or until he’s dead. You goaded him.’ He was nodding, a distasteful sneer on his face. ‘You drew him into this fight by mentioning his father.’ Morgrim turned to the other dwarf, the rows of silent hearthguard Snorri had left behind unmoving like statues behind them. ‘Why?’
‘Snorri, our prince, will do what he wants. It was he who brought an army to these gates, who forged the will of no less than four kings into a throng capable of challenging the elgi in their greatest citadel. Do you really think I, a lowly treasure hunter from the Southlands, could do anything to affect the mind of a dwarf capable of that?’
Morgrim snarled, turning away.
‘Signal Thagdor’s clans. I want Zhufbar prepared to march in support of the prince.’
Drogor didn’t react. His face was set as stone as he lifted the banner.
The elves were running, but to Snorri’s annoyance their flight was not a rout.
Shields as one, spears to the fore, the elves retreated in good order. At the head of the hearthguard, Snorri battered at them. He carried no shield,
